What It Takes To Run 9 Half Marathons—Incredibly Fast, No Less—At Age 59

The 10-minute rule applies to Karen Kunz's Tuesday-Thursday morning running group in Sacramento. Sure, the women who work out with her on a dirt track in Sacramento, California, are supposed to start at 5:30 a.m. But their running joke is they wait around until 5:40–usually because their leader hasn't shown up yet. "I'm not always known to be the most prompt," Kunz says.

If Kunz, 59, struggles to get to the track on time, she doesn't waste any extra seconds getting to finish lines. In 2013, she logged nine half marathons. Her best run of the year, 1:28:45 in October at the Urban Cow Half Marathon in Sacramento, was age-graded at 96.14%, the best percentage she's achieved in 40 years of competitive running.

As she approaches 60, Kunz considers herself lucky to be able to regularly race at sub-7:00 pace. She took her first run–wearing tennis shoes, tennis shorts and a polo shirt–in 1974 during her first fall at Iowa State University, but she didn't make the women's cross country team that year. She kept at it, though, and after she transferred to Northwest Missouri State University, she earned an athletic scholarship for her final two years of college, graduating with a degree in exercise physiology.

As the years went on, running and coaching remained a constant. In her 20s, she ran 35:40 for 10K, 1:17 for a half marathon and 2:50 at the Fiesta Bowl Marathon in 1982. For a period in the '80s, she was sponsored by adidas. In 1995, Kunz earned a degree in nursing, which landed her in her current position, as a surgical nurse at the VA hospital in Sacramento, where she has worked since 2004. Her shifts go from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. (she gets every other Monday off), and she's on her feet for hours at a time.

This explains why she has to start early if she wants to get her run out of the way in the morning. The track where she meets her training group is across the street from the hospital, and Kunz doesn't have to waste any time dressing for work each day–she wears scrubs.

Kunz's breakthrough 2013 came on the heels of a lost 18 months of running. In 2011, she started feeling pain on the left side of her groin. When the pain persisted, she saw an orthopedist, who ordered an X-ray. The films revealed a lesion, which looked like it could be cancerous, on the femur neck. Kunz underwent surgery to insert two screws into the femur neck at the site of the lesion, but a biopsy was inconclusive. Meanwhile, the pain got worse. In 2012, a second surgery replaced the screws in her femur, ruled out cancer and fixed a labral tear, which had been causing all the pain. A few days after the second surgery, her pain had almost disappeared. Kunz was cleared to return to running two months later.

In the meantime, she had begun to examine her diet and the extra 10 pounds that had crept onto her 5-foot 2-inch frame. "I eat really well. I mean, people make fun of me, calling me 'Miss Granola,' " Kunz says. "But I couldn't figure out, why am I getting this belly fat? And the back fat? And it's frustrating, because I don't want to have to run any more miles."

Kunz's daughter was looking to lose weight, and she signed up for the Medifast Diet. Kunz offered to try it with her as a show of solidarity. The program, based on a high-protein, low-carbohydrate philosophy and six small meals or snacks per day, helped Kunz shed her extra pounds within two weeks. These days, she carefully times her carbohydrate intake for before her runs and sticks to high-protein meals and snacks the rest of the day.

Kunz's mileage totals 40 to 45 per week, with short intervals on Tuesday, long intervals on Thursday and a long run on Saturday. For three of every four long runs, which are usually about 15 miles, she'll mix in hill repeats or several miles at tempo pace. (The fourth long run she does each month is at a steady state.) "I feel like you have to simulate what it feels like to do the marathon," Kunz says. "If you want to run 3:10 but you don't do a long run close to that pace, how do you think your body is going to do that?" She also stops at a gym on the way home from work a few days a week to use a Precor Adaptive Motion Trainer for 20 minutes. The "runner machine," as she's dubbed it, helps her target her posterior. "As you get older, your butt disappears," she says. "I think [the machine] really helps you engage your glutes."

In the Sacramento running community, Kunz has long led groups of runners, at one time helping 19 qualify for Boston in a single year. These days Kunz is keeping the group smaller, but they're just as enthusiastic about her guidance. "I PR'd by 15 minutes with her," says Gina Dayton, one of the morning runners in Kunz's group. "She helped me get more of a structure in my training and looked at my running more holistically—the sleep, the food you put into your body. She's good at making sure people take care of themselves."

While accompanying one of her athletes at a kickboxing class early in the year, Kunz strained a hamstring, which has interfered with her ability to do speed work and race as fast in 2014. But the strain is gradually improving, and she has her sights set on the marathon again once she turns 60 in July. "I'm planning on Chicago," she says, "and I'd like to do really well there."

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